Conclusion: What Has Happened, What Can Happen?

Abstract

In this concluding chapter to ‘Power, place and privilege in Australian society’, I bring together some of the key themes analysed throughout this book. In particular, I highlight how constructs of Australian identity, cultural imaginaries and the ‘Australian way of life’ are critical to understanding social and economic inequality in Australia. Dominant discourses that construct Australian national identity as white, masculine, Christian, English speaking and heteronormative are central to the privileging of whiteness in Australian society and the framing of Australian spaces and ‘white places’. This process legitimises settler-colonial possession of land in Australia, by constructing a sense of belonging that prioritises values imposed on Australian spaces through colonisation. This effectively constructs a dominant ‘in group’ within Australian society, who are normalised as mainstream, ordinary Australians, and who possess the right to exclude. This exclusion occurs through acts of racism and discrimination that aim to disrupt the right to belong of those who are perceived to be the ‘out group’. However, this is also evident in the maintenance of a neoliberal hegemony in Australia, that is based on settler-colonial possession of land, and which has reproduced privilege and power of people who identify with the dominant constructs of Australian identity, society and ‘way of life’. As I show throughout the book, social and economic restructuring, pursued by Australian governments since the 1980s, has sought to prioritise the power and profitability of capital. This has contributed to economic inequality and poverty, the proliferation of precarious work, coercive approaches to welfare, unequal access to health care, education and housing and experiences such as food insecurity. While these experiences of inequality are felt throughout society, those population groups who are portrayed as ‘the Other’ in discourses of national identity, frequently experience these impacts to a greater extent. This is framed as a normal and natural outcome of peoples’ capacities to participate in labour markets, education and housing markets. However, this conceals the fundamental inequalities that are present in Australian society. Similarly, opportunities for dissent and protest have been increasingly managed and criminalised by governments in ways that have enclosed public spaces and limited public debate. This chapter highlights how this repression is used to silence the voices of those who have experienced exclusion from Australian society, such as young people, First Nations peoples and people from diverse communities and cultural backgrounds. I conclude this chapter by drawing together examples of resistance and opportunities for change, that illustrate the potential to create a more inclusive and equitable Australian society.